Helephant.com is the personal site of web developer, Helen Emerson. It's a blog where I record all the things I learn about web development and ASP.NET.
Geeks are great but bet on the non-techies
I was talking to a friend of mine who is boycotting Facebook. She was a little surprised that I have a Facebook profile. I told her that I have a Facebook profile because all my non-techie friends have one. It’s makes it easy to keep in touch with a heap of people that I quite [...] Read More
Posted 2 weeks ago -
1 comment
Recent posts
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Ada Lovelace day - Molly Holzschlag, Kathy Hassinger and my mum -
Today I’ve been really enjoying all the stories posted for Ada Lovelace day, a day where we’re encouraged to blog about remarkable women in IT. I thought it was a nice idea when my friend emailed me about it so I thought I’d pitch in and write about three geek women who inspire me.
Web [...]
Posted 3 months ago - 1 comment -
To
(): a handy way to convert strings to other types - The int.parse() method is one I use a lot in ASP.NET so I wrote a handy extension method called To using generic return types and a little reflection that makes converting all these string values to another type incredibly simple.
Posted 4 months ago - 3 comments -
Improving the way ASP.NET handles 404 requests -
Sometimes things go wrong, information goes out of date, pages go missing. When these things happen it’s up to the humble 404 error page to let your users and the search engines know that things have changed. ASP.NET has a built in custom error pages feature to make it easy to set up your 404 [...]
Posted 5 months ago - 4 comments -
Date for OpenTech 09 announced -
One of my first and favourite UK conferences, OpenTech have just announced the date for 2009 is going to be July 4th.
It’s got more of a beardy, open source, linux feel to it than DDD day does but that’s one of the things I like about it. The talks are always really interesting. One [...]
Posted 5 months ago - Add comment -
Svelte asp.net: avoiding <form runat=”server”> -
Postbacks in ASP.NET have a pretty heavy cost in terms of page size. Add a <form runat=”server”> tag and now you have a big ugly viewstate tag to lug around each time you load a new page. Put in a control that triggers postback (like a linkbutton) and suddenly there’s a big chunk of script [...]
Posted 5 months ago - 1 comment -
Opening resx files in the xml editor -
Defaults can never please everyone. There’s always someone whose workflow is a little different. That one developer who likes to use SeaMonkey to test their pages or that weirdo who prefers to edit resx files as a text file.
I am that weirdo who likes to edit resx files as text files and rather than argue [...]
Posted 5 months ago - Add comment -
Snowy London Underground sign -
It’s a snowy day in London today. Apparently the most snow London’s seen in 20 years. It’s definitely the most snow I’ve ever seen. I was covered in snow and looking like a big white yeti by the time I got to the station this morning.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Transport for London [...]
Posted 5 months ago - 1 comment -
Reducing viewstate on custom controls -
One of the biggest waste I see in using viewstate is that it persists values that are already set in the aspx. These get set every time that the page runs and don’t need to be round tripped to the browser so that they will be persisted.
I did a little experiment a while back [...]
Posted 5 months ago - Add comment -
Goodbye 2008. Hello 2009 -
Wow, it’s January 18th already. I feel like I’ve really hit the ground running. Everyone else who did their new years post did them two weeks ago but I really wanted to write down what I’d achieved in 2008 and what I wanted to achieve in 2009 to give myself something to look at in [...]
Posted 5 months ago - 8 comments
Favourite posts
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Building objects with javascript -
The longer that I use javascript the more I realise it’s a great language.
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Saving server control properties to ViewState with custom attributes -
Use custom attributes to take the tedious work out of creating server control properties that persist to ViewState.
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Form layout using negative margins -
Use negative margins and light weight semantic markup to display a form with the labels on one side and form elements on the other.
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Generic method return types -
Generics aren't just great for creating lists, they can also be used to return strongly typed information from a method.
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Web Standards for ASP.NET developers -
Find out more about doing web standards compliant development if you develop in asp.net.
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DIY javascript stack trace -
How to use arguments.callee to walk up the javascript call stack when you're doing something that a debugger can't help you with.
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Using print stylesheets with ASP.NET themes -
Using the @media css declaration to create a print stylesheet when you're using ASP.NET themes to automatically include stylesheets.